Home From Circle City Con

Thanks CCC for having such a fun conference.  My first conference was technically SANSWest in San Diego when I was a facilitator for SEC 301.  However, I consider this to be my first in this type of conference.  Casual, yet technically oriented in some ways.  It wasn't a big con, but it wasn't tiny, either.

I went to a few training sessions while I was there:  Introduction to Forensics/Mobile Device Forensics, Writing My First Exploit, and Building A Home Lab.  They were good training sessions.  Unfortunately, some spoke fairly quickly, so it was tough to keep up sometimes.  I'm glad that I learned to take pics of some things.

In the evening, I went to a talk called Food Fight.  I tried to listen to the Embedded Device talk, but he was speaking and moving so quickly that I didn't really get much.  It is posted on YouTube, so I'll try to listen to it later, when I can pause it.

I went to a hacker dinner.  Hacks4Pancakes and the CCC were kind enough to arrange it.  It was interesting listening to the different viewpoints and thinking processes of people.

Much of the second day, after the training session, was spent in NetWars.  I finished in 7th place.  I ended up being a little farther along than I was before.  I was two points from 5th place.  I still have a lot to learn.  I made it further because of a giant hint from Jeff McJunkin.  He's a nice guy.  Funny thing, if I'd looked at the cheat sheet, I would have had the answer to a question that I was having trouble with.  I brought my cyber camp Metasploit book, but unless you have it indexed, it doesn't do much good.  It's been a good year since I picked it up.  Hint:  RTFM.  I've been working on Forensics challenges, and exploring some open source forensics tools, so that is where my time has been spent.  I'm also working through the Linux training and making an index for the SEC 301 GISF cert.

My 12 year old son tried NetWars and ended up in 15th place.  When he told me that he wanted to try NetWars, I told him to study Linux.  There's a nice intro course on edx.  He did.  I showed him some of the tools that I used for challenges, and how to find and read the help/man files.  I told him to not think too complicated.  He didn't.  (I need to follow that advice.)  He managed to unlock level 3 in NetWars.

I tried a couple of challenge coin challenges.  I might post my experience with them later.

Overall I think that the con was a good experience.